Recruitment Best Practice
Recruitment is ultimately about exercising judgement: to discriminate between candidates to identify the one who will be offered the opportunity to join your team.
Make a Plan: Recruitment takes time - sometimes up to six months.
Prepare your 'Spec' - what skills will the ideal candidate have? Be careful about defining 'essentials' - the tighter your spec, the more difficult it will be to find anyone.
Cover the post now with a temporary promotion - or a series of temporary promotions - it is unreasonable to ask people to take on a more senior job and carry on with all of their own - take something away.
This is the 'secret' for Recruitment Best Practice - always appoint people, to any job, who are going to be capable of moving up inside your organisation....... then, whenever you have a gap - look inside first, but invest in 'upskilling' / give them support - their success is your success - if they fail, you have failed.
Consider use of Agencies / or Search firms - for key senior posts you may have to show that the process has been conducted through 'due diligence', and search attracts more / better responses. Agencies are generally fast, but they always pass all of the costs on to you in addition to fees ranging for 15% to 30% of initial salary.
If you really MUST recruit from outside -
Attract Applicants
Web-based advertising is cost effective and quick. If you don't know which web sites are the best for the particular post - ask your staff - they will be using them already!
Do NOT kill applicants with tonnes of information - do you really want to present yourself as a serious bureaucrat?
Sift the responses - choose a longlist
The 'first cut' is more to do with elimination - cutting out the applicants who are too far outside your spec.
Be well organised - use a scoresheet matrix, with the key criteria in columns across the top - no more than 6 ideally, but 4 is not enough.
Use a simple scoring system, - 0 = Nothing 5 = Good, 8 Excellent (for example)
Keep this - it is evidence that you have undertaken the task fairly and systematically. Unfortunately you will be turning down a lot more people than you choose - and any one of those might want to challenge your decision-making.
Get another opinion
It is easy to make mistakes in reading through a lot of CVs - if there are some you cannot decide on - give those to someone else and ask for their input.
Use an Assessment Centre
More objective information makes the task easier. Remember that it is not possible to 'fail' a personality test - if you don't understand this, then call in the specialists, but then remember they are there to give you information for you to decide - tests should be used as sources of more information, NOT as final deciders.
Obtain references before interviews - and share these with the interviewers, so that issues raised can be explored.
Interview
This process has to be fair, but that does NOT mean that every candidate must be asked precisely the same questions - if you establish (fairly) after 20 minutes that someone really is not suited to the post, then politely and professionally bring it to an end. Equally, if someone says something really interesting, you must allow time to follow up.
Research evidence shows that interviews conducted by two interviewers together, is most effective. With every additional interviewer from 3 upwards, the effectiveness goes down.
Keep notes - and use the same criteria as are in the original Job Spec - again, you might have to produce these as evidence to show that your decsions were reasonable.